It took a crew with confidence in their skills and their aircraft to rescue an ill physician stranded at the South Pole. At the controls was a pilot who learned to fly on his Northern bush pilot father's knee.
Terry Halifax
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Apr 30/01) - The pilot who logged the historic rescue mission into the frigid darkness of the South Pole winter took his first flight on his father's knee in Cambridge Bay.
Sean Loutitt was only two-weeks old when he took his first flight, according to his father Allan "Tuckey" Loutitt, who runs Reliance Air out of Fort Smith.
The thirst for adventure, "must be in the blood," said Allan, who was flying medevacs out of Cambridge Bay when Sean was born.
"He came with me every time the opportunity presented itself," the elder Loutitt, a veteran of 45 years of flying in the North, said in an interview last week.
Sean, the chief pilot for Kenn Borek Air, flew a modified deHavilland Twin Otter to the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on April 24, to evacuate an ailing doctor.
The next day, Loutitt and crew returned the plane safely form the pole completing the 1,300-mile return trip to Rothera, a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) station, en route to its destination in Chile.
The father and son have flown into history at either ends of the world. While he's never quite been to the North Pole, Allan flew many early flights into Winter Harbour and Resolute Bay for Pacific Western Airlines.
General Manager of Kenn Borek Air, Steve Penikett, said the historic flight to the South Pole went off without a hitch.
"They landed in Punta, Chile about 2:40 p.m. our time," Penikett said.
Two Twin Otters with expanded fuel capacity were used for the mission because temperature at the pole is so extreme that a Hercules would have froze-up.
"The normal Twin Otter has about a four-hour range; these ones can fly for about 13 hours," he said.
Penikett said the crew will return the 10,000 miles by flying from Chile, to Ecuador, Grand Cayman Islands, Houston, and be home to Calgary by this Thursday.
Confident in son's abilities
Sean's father knows the dangers of flying in darkness and white-out conditions, but was confident in his son's abilities and the crew around him.
"This was a tough flight, but we know the people he works with and they all work so well together," he said. "This was not just Sean, this whole thing was so much a team effort."
"It's the other things that bother me; the weather and the darkness," he added. "They risked their lives, because they are going into an unknown.
"They tend to tell us everything is fine, but we always wonder," he said. "I find it hard to imagine that it was all roses."
He said Sean worked around the home base growing up and while going to school in Yellowknife, went to work as dock boy for Latham Air. He got his pilot's license while studying at university. Once out of school, Sean went to work for Buffalo Airways.
"Then First Air wanted to hire him, so Buffalo made him captain," Allan laughed. "That's one way to get promoted."
He had hoped his son might take up the family business, but Sean saw the hardships the small operators go through to keep their planes in the air and sought the stability of a larger company.
"We never tried to hold him back at all," he said. "If he wanted this company he was welcome to have it."
Sean went to work with Kenn Borek Air with a chance to fly to the Antarctic. He's been flying to the South Pole for four years now. Now he and his wife Sandi --who is also a pilot-- fly with Borek all over the world.
Now stationed in Calgary, Sean rarely touches down in his home town any more. "We don't see him much, he's always flying here and there," Allan said.
